Udik

> Adichie is transphobic

Maybe we can start by defining exactly what it means to be "transphobic", so we can decide both:

1) whether someone is or not transphobic;

2) how bad it is to be transphobic.

So how do you define "transphobic"?

Good question. By "copy SV" I meant "set up an environment (law, financing) similar to the SV one. Looking for VC funding in China for example you get this (from here [1]):

"According to the Wall Street Journal, investments by Chinese VCs now represent 40 percent of the worldwide total (Silicon Valley still leads the field at 44 percent [edit: this puts Europe at 12% at most]) and China’s share is 15 times greater than in 2013.

VC investment in China grew by 3,000 percent – from 1.1 billion dollars to 34.1 billion dollars – between 2006 and 2016, with the fastest growth occurring between 2013 and 2016 (up to 2013, average VC investment in China was 4.3 billion dollars a year). This rate of growth continued after 2016.

Chinese startups attracted more VC money than their American counterparts – 56 billion dollars as opposed to 42 billion dollars – for the first time in the first half of 2018. However, that has not proved to be all good news. Due to the availability of VC money, and pressure by owners and shareholders of VC funds to invest,even less promising startups can secure funding relatively easily in China."

[1] https://www.netherlandsworldwide.nl/countries/china/startup-...

Archive: https://archive.is/9ORZL

I remember Facebook's ipo. If I'm not wrong, the shares crashed for a few weeks/months right after the initial enthusiasm. It wasn't clear at all that Facebook was going to keep growing indefinitely.

By the way, did you buy Coinbase shares? In ten years it could be another example of some obvious buy ("big, dominant and in the news"). Or they might have turned to junk, too.

> backed by French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission Vice President Margrethe Vestager, Qwant was designed to become a rival to U.S. search giant Google and bolster the EU's tech sector

How embarrassing is this? This is like playing with rocket bottles and claiming your aim is to rival SpaceX. The level of wishful thinking here is worth of a not too smart 12 yo. It's appalling to hear it coming from a major country and even the EU. Really, it's cringe worth.

The EU, France, need to swallow their misplaced, ridiculous pride and understand one simple thing: if you want SV results, you need to fucking copy SV. Otherwise just shut up and don't make an embarrassment of yourself.

(European here, just in case someone takes this for some nationalistic rant from the US).

> they're the only democratic country in the Middle East

Yes. All citizens can vote. All those who can't vote are not citizens- which doesn't prevent the Israeli government from actually governing them. Since the division is along ethnic lines, this is usually called apartheid.

Thanks!

There is an old artificial life simulator (darwinbots http://wiki.darwinbots.com/w/Main_Page ) that is inspired by grobots-like programming games. Each organism is driven by its own code that can mutate randomly at each reproduction.

I've been trying to produce a web version of it. This is where I got so far (before more or less desisting):

http://darwinjs.herokuapp.com/

The problem is that there are groups that, given ~A => B, would argue both against A and against B.

The typical concentration of co2 in a "well aerated" indoors environment is between 400 and 1000ppm. So, no.

Decentralisation, guaranteed immutability, entirely trustless system are the things that made a bitcoin worth tens of thousands with a market cap of hundreds of millions. Otherwise it would be worth nothing, it's just a record in a public database.

There are people (many, smart people) literally paying millions or billions to add a simple record to that database; there's many more- hackers, organised criminals, state agencies, that would love to able to change that record. The amount of pressure that that simple database is able to withstand, and the amount of trust that has been able to gain, are mind blowing. So that's a success, I'd say.

Bird equivalent of Jacuzzi.

Come on, do you seriously believe I'm paid by the Chinese government? I just went to the Wikipedia entry and read it. I can't vouch for its correctness, but it contains more info than the GP. If you're in doubt, you can check it and check the relative discussion in the talk page - sometimes if there is bias in the entry the talk page highlights it (I didn't check it).

Reading the Wikipedia entry about the Tienanmen massacre, it seems that that cable is completely unreliable. While Western estimates of the number of victims is now of about three thousand at most, decade long efforts in China to locate the victims' families has only managed to count about 200, more or less consistent with China's official numbers.

Also, apparently, there was no massacre in the square itself, which was evacuated by military mostly in anti-riot gear.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protes...

Did anyone seriously expect the report to say that those things are "aliens"?

The fact that it says that (at least some) encounters did actually occur and that they cannot be explained is already some news.

> I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse

I've witnessed the same exact pattern multiple times in the last few years- often in relation to China. It's as if suddenly everyone not only shifts opinion, but exhibits the same amount of faith in it as if that opinion had been the most accepted for years.

This speaks volumes about 1) the ability of media (and possibly of powerful, interested parties) to sway the public opinion; 2) the easiness with which people align themselves to a (perceived) majority without ever looking back.

In particular, what has happened here is probably that the presence of Trump prevented half of the US from aligning to a narrative that would have been otherwise quite successful, given the political times. Trump gone, that half of the country suddenly was free to align itself with that narrative.

> They've been outspoken in their attempts to conflate Israel (and Israel's Jews) with Judaism as a whole

But let's not pretend that the connection between Israel and US Jews is simply a prejudice. Here's an article from the Times of Israel quoting a recent Pew research:

"More than 80% of American Jews said caring about Israel was an important or essential part of what being Jewish means to them." [1]

If this is how important is Israel to American Jews identity ("important or essential part of what being Jewish means to them") then it makes sense to ask them, as a group, how do they reconcile this identity with the violent actions of Israel.

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-gaza-conflict-escalates-her...

But again, "racist" is a very grave accusation, are you sure that a single inappropriate sentence (missing possibly just a qualifier, "Israeli Jew") at the end of a more articulated argument is enough to qualify someone as a racist?

> It's the blanket statements about Jewish people that I'd call anti-semitic.

I find those inappropriate too- I think he might have gotten carried too far in making his point. However, on one hand I think it's an understandable slip: after all, Israel calls itself the Jewish homeland and often tries to extend criticism it receives to all Jews (by calling it antisemitic). This with little objection from Jews elsewhere. On the other hand, "antisemitic" is a very strong accusation: are we sure there aren't middle grounds, such as calling something inappropriate or incorrect, without associating it straight away with one of the worst mass murders in history?

The real apartheid in Israel is not against its Arab population (although by various means a good part of it doesn't even have citizenship). The real apartheid is what happens in the occupied territories, where Jews enjoy all the benefits and protection of their citizenship while Arabs are deprived of any rights.

Easy, but then don't pretend that people calling Israel criminal are antisemitic.

(Also, let's not pretend there aren't a lot of non Israeli Jews defending Israel whatever it does).

"Security concerns" are not enough to judge the situation. Mobsters surround themselves of armed guards as much as the investigators trying to capture them. Nations that start wars need to protect themselves from counter-attacks and retaliation. Israel is in blatant violation of international law and handsomely profiting from it: 10% of its population lives on land that doesn't belong to the state and that by international agreements has to be returned to its legitimate owners.

This is silly. A twitter storm is a pretty well defined, public event. Do you seriously think it would be common to post racist stuff on the internet, and then organise a permanent campaign against yourself, in order to become un-fireable for causes that are work related? A company that wants to fire you for your poor performance can do so, and if you sue them it's not going to be hard for them to prove they have a legitimate cause which has nothing to do with your self-organised mobbing campaigns.

> Companies fire such people pre-emptively, out of fear of such boycotts... Otherwise why would any company bow?

Because firing someone is cheap. It's not "damage control", it's virtue signalling, as costly as it is for others to express their outrage on twitter.

I don't understand what you mean, can you elaborate?

> Which actions exactly should be illegal?

Firing an employee or terminating a contract in response to a twitter mob.

You are of course free to boycott whoever you want- but my impression is that those threatened boycotts won't really cause much damage to companies. People keep saying that firings are meant to "limit damage" but I have yet to see proof of this. To me it is mostly virtue signalling on the part of the involved businesses- it's not meant to prevent an economic damage but as a form of PR and advertising.

I agree, and it unnerves me because the solutions seem to be easy. Just allow users to tag an answer as outdated, or to add a "valid until YYYY" tag. This would provide a quick indication when skimming answers, without removing old ones. It could also allow to reopen an old question in case the accepted answer or all its answers are marked as outdated.

From [1]

> In the future, I plan to make URLs opaque when building level 3 APIs. Instead of http://foo.ploeh.dk/customers/1234/orders, I'm going to make it http://foo.ploeh.dk/DC884298C70C41798ABE9052DC69CAEE .... Obviously, that means that my API will have to maintain some sort of two-way lookup table that can map DC884298C70C41798ABE9052DC69CAEE to a request for customer 1234's orders

I pity the people who had to work with him, and the many thousands of hours this has probably ended up costing.

Oh yes, the best were those who seriously claimed, in my company, that actual endpoints should have been random UUIDs. Because, you know, you must get there only through "discoverability" and hypermedia links.

> So immediately not using Bitcoin would save as much CO2 as 4.5 million cars of the road

Which would have zero net effect on climate change (total number of cars in the world is 1.4 billion). Conversely, transition all cars to electric, renewable sources and dirty bitcoin emissions still won't be a problem (assuming they can be capped at some value instead of growing indefinitely).

In other words, current bitcoin contribution to climate change is the last of our problems- for now. But I understand that the idea of such an amazing amount of energy being wasted is something that immediately triggers an innate sense of abhorrence.